Digital Ocean + Server Pilot + wordpress setup

I had always thought of going with Amazon Servers (AWS) when I needed more power from my servers or else i just stick to my server with Exabytes or my personal server with Fatcow . But recently I have discovered Digital Ocean a Virtual Private Server. Quote from wiki

A VPS runs its own copy of an operating system, and customers have superuser-level access to that operating system instance, so they can install almost any software that runs on that OS.

Basically you have your own computer instead of sharing it with other people. The interface for this is so beautiful I can’t help but want to use it and its affordable! The reason for me to pick Digital Ocean instead of AWS is because of its price and easy setup interface. At 10$ a month and you can upgrade it as you need it !

Awesome! But using the VPS means you have to do a lot of things yourselves and you don’t have cpanel. But you can install it if you want to pay the monthly price for it. There are a lot of other choices besides cpanel out there free and paid. So i did some research…

After some research I have decided to go with ServerPilot for these reasons:

Pretty!

Developed with digital ocean in mind therefore easy to setup for DigitalOcean

Server pilot is cloud based server management. This means this is 0% of your CPU time & resources is being used by the control panel! How awesome is that!

How to setup Server Pilot on Digital Ocean. Note this guide is for intermediate user.( Click on the support button in DigitalOcean to access help documentation on any parts that is not covered in this article. Support>Getting started setup. Anything needed to in this guide like SSH and Domain name etc. is found in that guide in DigitalOcean support page )

First create a droplet and name it. The name is for your reference only.

Choose the Droplet size I choose 10$/mo for now if you have a namecard/info site just use the 5$ one.

Select the closes region to you.

Up to you but I would recommend turning on backup.

Select ubuntu 64-bit as the OS because that is server pilots requirement. I would recommend create an account with server pilot at the same time to check on this.

I always use ssh keys but if you are not sure what that is just use password leave it empty.

Create droplet!

Setup DNS so that your domain name can point to this server.

Go to DNS section on your digital ocean and click “add domain” .

enter the domain name and ip address in this case it would be the one in your PTR records.

Here I learned the hard way. That you want to remember to add another A records for the www same ip address

ok Now that’s done its time to go to your Domain names control panel to add the necessary name servers. Now if you have those international domain name resellers like godaddy its really easy. Just add the 3 NAMESERVERS namely. ns1.digitalocean.com ns2.digitalocean.com ns3.digitalocean.com.
But if you were so unfortunate as to own a .my or .com.my domain namei recommend you let whichever company you bought that domain name to configure it for you. Add this 3Nameservers and their IP

But if you still insist on managing it yourself here is a summary of what I had to do.
First you have to get a technical user access to the domain from Mynic.my . Admin access wont allow you to edit the domain. Then you need to login to your user account using Username+password then the user keycode which is supposed to be already set as the technical user for the domain name by the Admin user of the domain name. Ok now you can edit or add name servers. Ok just create new ones. Here is another stupid crap user interface design problem. You cant just add the nameservers and ip you have to create a record for it and get it approved by the admin. But chances are it has already been created because when i did it it had already existed. Click on the magnifying glass icon next to adding new nameserver and search with the ip and you should be able to find one with the correct name server name as above. Repeat this for all 3 and you are finally DONE 😀

Ok now we should have an empty server already now to install control panel so we can have LAMP(Apache, Php, mysql) + phpMyadmin. Lets go to ServerPilot.io!

Ok server pilot says we need to first install an installer.

Now we need to SSH into our server, for windows this means putty.

Right click copy the command. then go into putty window right click and the command will be pasted into putty command window. Press enter and voila it should be installing.

Bam ServerPilot connected!

Alright next we want to use ServerPilot to set up our server

ServerPilot calls their Domains/sites Apps. So go ahead and add a new app. Dont worry about the php version you can change it later as well. Current stable version is 5.6

check php . 5.4 as of time of writing Nov 2014 support for 5.4 will be over soon. I would go for 5.6 but worried some wordpress plugins might not work. therefore selected 5.5
http://php.net/supported-versions.php

Woot that’s it! now we have Apache + Nginx, PHP and MYSQL installed in the server.

Note the username in the previous picture under the overview tab for your apps. The system user. That is the username you should use to login to your app. But first you need to create a password for it by clicking on the username.

Then putty in with the username and password. then proceed with the wordpress setup.